Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick (1968)
“A bounty hunter who kills androids for a living begins to wonder if he is one — and whether the question even matters.”
At a Glance
In a post-nuclear San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is assigned to 'retire' six escaped Nexus-6 androids. To do so he must administer the Voigt-Kampff empathy test — which measures emotional responses and is the only thing distinguishing human from android. As he retires each android, his certainty about what constitutes life, empathy, and humanity erodes. Alongside his story runs John Isidore's, a 'chickenhead' — a radiation-diminished human — whose apartment is infiltrated by the escaped androids. Both men care for creatures that may not care back. The novel ends without resolution: Deckard returns to an empty apartment, finds a toad he believes is real, and discovers it is electric. It doesn't change how he holds it.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published to modest commercial response in 1968, the novel was transformed into a cultural landmark by Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, which adapted it loosely but amplified its philosophical questions into the mainstream. The book is now among the most taught science-fiction texts in college literature and philosophy departments. It coined or popularized several concepts that have entered philosophical discourse: the question of android consciousness as a test case for theories of mind, the idea of empathy as the defining human trait, and the use of SF genre conventions to do rigorous ethical philosophy.
Diction Profile
Flat, functional prose punctuated by recursive philosophical anxiety — Dick writes in the cadence of a man who suspects his own thoughts
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